Phony cheer in unemployment numbers

Obama partisans are hailing the "surprising" fall in unemployment as a sign that a recovery is showing strength. But the official metric for unemployment, U-3, counts only people actively looking for jobs, and that is the figure which has declined to 7.7%. Neil Irwin in the Washington Post explains:
The jobless rate dropped in large part because the labor force fell by 350,000, suggesting that people gave up looking for work. The number of people saying they had a job actually fell by 122,000. And the Labor Department revised downward its estimates of job creation in September and October by a combined 49,000.
So as 122k more people became unemployed, we celebrate a decline in unemployment. Welcome to the fantasy world of government statistics.
It is even worse. Guess who's been hiring? Terrey Jeffrey knows:
The unemployment rate for government workers plunged from 4.2 percent in October to 3.8 percent in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as government...(Read Full Post)